Climate change acknowledgement and responses of summer (glacier) ski visitors in Norway

Abstract

The mutual interaction of climate change and the highly weatherdependent ski tourism business is drawing increasing attention from the academic, commercial and political arenas. Changes in the cryosphere are becoming major determinants of the sustainability of ski areas. Therefore, there is a great deal of literature entailing impact and adaptation studies regarding ski areas, resorts, and destinations; however, research on the demand side of the issue is relatively limited. In this paper, the relationship between climate change and a niche segment of ski tourism, summer skiing, is discussed with regard to the awareness, perceptions, and mitigation and substitution behaviours of visitors to the summer downhill ski centres in Norwayan underresearched country, despite its recognition as the cradle of skiing. For this purpose, a comprehensive survey was administered to a sample of 224 subjects. The results revealed high climate change awareness but limited climate friendliness, and a strong emphasis on the immediate climate impacts on summer skiing that create a tendency towards ski activity substitution within Norway. Individual profiles also played a significant role in the anticipated mitigation and substitution behaviours. The implications of the results involving demand attitude and behaviour are further discussed with regard to the suppliers.

Microclimatic Volatility and Elasticity of Glacier Skiing Demand

“…Nevertheless, such change could have negative implications for summer skiing, but the growing non-skier market that demands high WCF could then compensate for the losses from the skier market and has already done so in the last 15 years. As our results show, pedestrians are more sensitive towards adverse weather conditions than summer skiers, who are usually experienced, or even (semi-)professional skiers [18,50,58]. Moreover, in a warming climate, glacier ski areas are likely to sustain their competitive edges over the ski areas in lower altitudes even in the case of further glacier retreat and shrinking ice masses due to the superior snowmaking conditions and gain from spatial substitution, as demonstrated by the direct comparison of the winter seasons 2005/06 and 2006/07 [7,59], sometimes at the risk of increased congestion and, thus, reduced attractivity.…”

“…As evident in the state of the art research on climate and skiing relationship, most models, so far [6,13,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38], have utilized indicators based on weather and climate variables such as snow depth, snow water equivalent, snowfall, snow density, avalanche index, temperature, wind chill, visibility, and cloudiness as the main regressors, whereas other variables such as precipitation (rain, freezing rain, etc.) and wind speed have also been mentioned as important in consumer surveys with winter [49] and summer [50] skiers. Additionally, many studies, especially those based on long-term aggregate data [13,19,21,[24][25][26][27][28]31,37], have attempted to control for changes in economic variables such as income, consumer prices, gas and airfare prices, exchange rates, unemployment rates, and changes in ski tourism supply in question.…”

Will concerns for ski tourism promote pro‐environmental behaviour? An implication of protection motivation theory

“…This might induce the cognitive threat appraisal process and thus influence tourist's intention to help mitigate the problem. Although the topic of skier's mitigation intention has gained some research attentions (e.g., Demiroglu, Dannevig, & Aall, ), it has not been fully researched. For example, the antecedents of mitigation intention, the cognitive process that induces behavioural intention have not been discussed yet.…”

The Top-Viewed Cryosphere Videos on YouTube: An Overview

“…The cryosphere service function, aiming at the decision-makers' and public awareness of environmental protection, has been proposed by Xiao et al [8]. Finally, Demiroglu et al [9] investigated the visitors' perception of a shrinking glacier in a ski resort in Norway. Studies touching on the topic of the perception of glaciers and glacier-related risks have been performed in inhabited high mountain ranges of the world, among others in the Himalayas [10][11][12], and Andes [13][14][15].…”